Linkstrom v. Golden T. Farms

• Decision Date: 28 August 1989
• Docket Number: No. 89-1009,89-1009
• Citation: 883 F.2d 269
• Parties: 28 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 860 LINKSTROM, Deborah, as Administratrix of the Estate of Sylvestre Garcia, Jr., Deceased, Appellant, v. GOLDEN T. FARMS Trumbower, Douglas Franklin Trumbower, Ord Gallardo, Marcelo and Gallardo, Criselda.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit

Page 269

883 F.2d 269

28 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 860

LINKSTROM, Deborah, as Administratrix of the Estate of Sylvestre Garcia, Jr., Deceased, Appellant, v. GOLDEN T. FARMS Trumbower, Douglas Franklin Trumbower, Ord Gallardo, Marcelo and Gallardo, Criselda.

No. 89-1009.

United States Court of Appeals Third Circuit.

Argued June 1, 1989.

Decided Aug. 28, 1989.

Peter M. Patton (argued), Joseph Lurie, Gelfand, Berger, Lurie & March, Philadelphia, Pa., for appellant.

Francis X. Brennan (argued), Swartz, Campbell & Detweiler, Philadelphia, Pa., for appellees.

Before HIGGINBOTHAM, GREENBERG and HUTCHINSON, Circuit Judges.

OPINION OF THE COURT

A. LEON HIGGINBOTHAM, Jr., Circuit Judge.

This wrongful death action concerns a young migrant farm worker who died in an agricultural accident. The trial judge refused to permit the plaintiff's farm safety expert to testify regarding the safety practices a reasonable and prudent farmer would follow, and the plaintiff appeals that ruling. We review an evidentiary ruling of the district court for abuse of discretion. In re Japanese Electronic Products, 723 F.2d 238, 260 (3d Cir.1983), rev'd on other grounds, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (1986).

In our review, "[e]rror may not be predicated upon a ruling which admits or excludes evidence unless a substantial right of the party is affected ..." Fed.R.Evid. 103(a).

I.

The facts of this case as recounted below are simple and essentially undisputed. On the day of his death, Sylvestre Garcia, Jr. ("Garcia"), age 14, was working on the farm of Douglas Trumbower as a "dumper," a person who stands on the back of a flat-bed truck and dumps tomatoes picked by others into bins. Appellant's Appendix ("App.") at 37, 91.

At the time of the fatal accident, the tomato picking operation was moving from one tomato field to another, through an apple orchard, and Garcia was standing on the flat-bed truck as it went. App. at 88-89, 91-92. Ord Trumbower, the father of Douglas Trumbower, owner of the farm that his son leased and allegedly his son's agent, knew that dumpers sometimes rode between fields standing on trucks. On the day of the accident Ord Trumbower drove through the orchard, aware that a flat-bed truck was behind him. App. at 22-23, 50-51, 54-58, 84-86. No one saw the accident. A few moments after the flat-bed truck drove into the orchard, Garcia lay unconscious on the ground, under the damaged branch of an apple tree; he died almost immediately thereafter. App. at 95-97.

II.

The appellant, Deborah Linkstrom, administratrix of Garcia's estate, claims that the trial judge abused his discretion in refusing to permit a farm safety expert to testify. We agree.

The admissibility of expert opinion evidence is governed by Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. It provides:

If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise.

Fed.R.Evid. 702.

This court has noted that "[h]elpfulness is the touchstone of Rule 702," Breidor v. Sears, Roebuck and Co., 722 F.2d 1134, 1139 (3d Cir.1983). It has further indicated that it will interpret possible helpfulness to the trier of fact broadly and will favor admissibility in doubtful cases.

"[D]oubts about whether an expert's testimony will be useful should generally be resolved in favor of admissibility unless there are strong factors such as time or surprise favoring exclusions. The jury is intelligent enough, aided by counsel, to ignore what is unhelpful in its deliberations."

In re Japanese Electronic Products, 723 F.2d at 279 (quoting 3 J. Weinstein & M. Berger, Weinstein's Evidence p 702, at 702-14-15 (1982) (footnotes omitted)). See, e.g., U.S. v. Theodoropoulos, 866 F.2d 587 (3d Cir.1989); Salas by Salas v. Wang, 846 F.2d 897 (3d Cir.1988); but see U.S. v. Dowling, 855 F.2d 114 (3d Cir.1988).

Moreover, there is no requirement that expert testimony be "beyond the jury's sphere of knowledge." In re Japanese Electronic Products, 723 F.2d at 279. Such a requirement is, in our view,

"incompatible with the standard of helpfulness expressed in Rule 702. First, it assumes wrongly that there is a bright line separating issues within the comprehension of jurors from those that are not. Secondly, even when jurors are well equipped to make judgments on the basis of their common knowledge and experience, experts may have specialized knowledge to bring to bear on the same issue which would be helpful."

Id. (quoting 3 J. Weinstein and M. Berger, Weinstein's Evidence, p 702 at 702-9-10 (1982)) (footnotes omitted).

The proffer of the farm safety expert's testimony, as contained in the Pre-Trial Order, reads as follows:

Mr. Jester will testify as an expert witness that the practice of farm labor crew members traveling from field to field while riding on the back of flat-bed trucks created a severe risk of injury to farm labor crew members. Mr. Jester will testify that a reasonable and prudent person in the position of the Defendants would have identified the hazard associated with such transportation practices, and employed reasonable accident measures to reduce or eliminate the severe risk of injury including, but not limited to, prohibiting farm labor crew members from standing on beds or appendages any time such trucks were moving.

App. at 256. More generally, Linkstrom intended her expert to testify as to "what a reasonable farmer does while employing contract labors [sic] as far as issuing safety rules and seeing that the work is conducted in a safe manner." App. at 140. She argued "that there are standards of good practice in the farm industry regarding safety of operations such as this. And that the farmer, in this case Mr. Trumbower, violated those standards." App. at 141.

The Trumbowers claimed that the standard in the industry had nothing to do with whether they had acted properly, and that the question was, simply, whether they had exercised reasonable care, which was "a judgment call" that the jury could make unassisted. App. at 143. The trial judge did not elaborate his reasons for excluding the expert's testimony, but he seemed to agree with the Trumbowers when he said, "I think I'm going to stick with the reasonable man theory and I'm going to exclude your expert ..." App. at 144. Under the standard approved in In re Japanese Electronic Products, 723 F.2d at 279, barring strong factors favoring exclusion, the testimony should have been allowed if there was some reason to think it might have been useful. The thrust of the Trumbowers' argument was that the testimony was useless because it was irrelevant to the jury's understanding of what a reasonable person in the Trumbowers' position would do. The district court agreed. We do not.

Jurors can be assumed to know how a reasonable and prudent person behaves, but a reasonable and prudent person does not automatically know how to act in a situation with which he or she is unfamiliar,...